An Elearning Design Reading List

Posted on August 19, 2014 by jdirksen

Several things have led to me actually writing a blog post. First, I’m home for two whole weeks straight (this alone is a small miracle). I’m also relatively up to date with my inbox and to do list (much larger miracles). I’m also indulging in some productive procrastination (which is probably the real reason).

Anyway, I typically keep a list of resources when I teach the ATD (ASTD) Advanced Instructional Design for Elearning Certificate, and I keep thinking that I should put the list somewhere. So here it is:

Blogs et al:

Cathy Moore — her blog and The Elearning Blueprint
Tom Kuhlmann’s Rapid Elearning Blog and Articulate’s Elearning Heroes Community
Connie Malamed’s Elearning Coach Website
Dan Meyer on Math, Being Less Helpful, and how to teach problem solving

Presentations

Bryan Chapman’s How Long Does It Take To Create Learning presentation?
Stephen Anderson’s presentations Stop Doing What You Are Told and From Paths to Sandboxes
Anything Sebastian Deterding says about Gamification
Usability.gov and Section508.gov (though the 508 folks could use some help from the usability folks)

Software Tools:

Branchtrack and Versal – two interesting new elearning tools — can’t fully endorse them as they are still beta-ish, but interesting to look at.
Quandary Examples – a free (and unsupported) tool for making branched learning games.

Research-based Resources

Ruth Clark’s Elearning and the Science of Instruction
Will Thalheimer’s Research Reports
Art Kohn’s 2+2+2 method in Learning Solutions Magazine
The Research for Practitioners Series at Learning Solutions
Science Daily’s Mind & Brain feed

Behavioral Economics

Books

John Medina’s Brain Rules
Daniel Pink’s Drive
James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
Jesse Schell’s Art of Game Design
Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think
Reuben Tozmans’ Learning On Demand
Chad Udell’s Learning Everywhere
Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web
Roy Baumeister’s Willpower
David Rock’s Your Brain At Work
Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards
Everett Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow
Jane Bozarth’s Show Your Work
Peter Brown et al’s Make It Stick
Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis
Robert Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Model
Amy Jo Kim’s Community Building for the Web

Anything by Kathy Sierra

Creating Passionate Users Blog
Excellent Podcasts on Motivation, Self-Determination Theory and Behaviorism
Building The Minimum Badass User Presentation
SeriousPony.com
The Head First Formula

The “I can’t believe I forgot…” Add-ons

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Updated — some new books that have come out since I originally wrote this post:

Kathy Sierra’s Badass: Making User’s Awesome (and rejoicing was hear through the land!)
Connie Malamed’s Visual Design Solutions
Will Thalheimer’s book on doing Level 1 Evaluation – currently available via kickstarter.

Designing for Data and Learning UX

Posted on May 27, 2014 by jdirksen

Hey folks, a couple of things that have been happening lately:

The fabulous Janet Laane Effron and Sean Putnam are doing a MOOC on learning design for data. This is going to be a big deal in our field, and this is really nice, accessible opportunity to learn more.

It starts today (May 27th), but it’s definitely not to late to join. You’ll also get to see the curatr platform, which is one of the more interesting learning interfaces to be developed in the last few years.

Also, I did a presentation at the ASTD (erm, ATD) ICE Conference on User Experience (UX) for learning. Slides are here:

UX for Learning Design from Julie Dirksen

Stephen Anderson – From Paths to Sandboxes

Posted on April 2, 2014 by jdirksen

Sat in on Karl Fast and Stephen Anderson‘s Design for Understanding workshop at the IA Summit last week, and it was double-plus-good.

Here are Stephen’s slides from his IA Summit presentation. Excellent stuff relating to autonomy in learning environments, and multitudes more:

From Paths to Sandboxes from Stephen Anderson

Immersive Learning

Posted on March 25, 2014 by jdirksen

I have this great little shelf in the bookshelf app on my ipad. It’s just books by people I know. I feel genuinely privileged to know so many people with so many interesting things to say.

Some of them are drafts for books that are still in progress., but one that’s already out in the world is Koreen Pagano’s Immersive Learning: Designing for Authentic Practice:

It’s great, for a few different reasons:

Reason 1: The subtitle — Designing for Authentic Practice. So immersive learning environments can sometimes be shiny objects. Remember when everything L&D was going to start happening in Second Life? Yep, that didn’t happen.

One of the reason’s it didn’t happen was because there was because the focus was on the technology (“Ooo – we can build a virtual replica of our corporate university!”) and not on the really interesting part — the possibility for high-context practice. We remember more if we learn something in the same environment where we will use the information, so virtual worlds were interesting for that reason, but that got lost in the hype cycle. Koreen rightly focuses on the real purpose for immersive learning – high-context practice environments. It’s about the practice, not the technology.

Reason 2: The case studies — So, one of the problems with a lot of L&D books is that they are more about what can be done, rather than examples of what has been done. This naturally happens with new technologies. When they were brand new, both mobile and xAPI have had to start with the possibilities rather than real examples, until some critical mass built, allowing for case examples.

Immersive learning suffered similarly for a long time, but if anybody is able to speak from direct experiences, it’s Koreen. The book is worth it for the case studies alone. Lots of really good examples of use, with the kind of nitty gritty details you need to help inform your own practice.

Reason 3: Underwear Gnomes — how can you not love a book that starts with a really well-played South Park reference? It’s indicative of Koreen’s overall accessible, entertaining style, which makes the book a really pleasurable read.

Manifestos and MCQs

Posted on March 13, 2014 by jdirksen

Hey folks,

So a couple of quick things. A few of us launched this today: http://elearningmanifesto.org/ — would love to know if it seems useful 🙂

And second, I was collecting some resources on writing good multiple choice questions (which is really hard), and thought they might be useful to post here

Will Thalheimer has some things on his site – mostly shorter job aids:

http://www.work-learning.com/catalog.html

He also wrote three articles on scenario-based questions that are here:

http://www.immersivelearninguniversity.com/articlethalheimersep13

Cathy Moore also has some good blog posts:

http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2007/08/can-you-answer-these-6-questions-about-multiple-choice-questions/

http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2008/03/how-to-fit-the-entire-world-in-a-multiple-choice-question/

A number of universities have guidelines for their faculty — you can probably find several by googling. For example:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/writing-good-multiple-choice-test-questions/

Usable Learning Busy-ness

Posted on May 31, 2013 by jdirksen

Hey folks — am returned from all the San Francisco adventures, and am happy to be home.

Now that I have time to draw breath, I’ll actually finish some of those blog posts, but here’s a round up of stuff that’s been going on, in no particular order:

There’s a new Research For Practitioners piece up at Learning Solutions, by the delightful Chris Atherton (Yay! Happy dance!) on how the structure of information impacts learning. Go ahead and read it now, if you like. We’ll wait here for you.

I wrote a piece for Inside Learning Technologies Magazine on Fixing eLearning’s Big Problem (do you agree? just curious).

Just got back from a busy week at ASTD ICE (did a certificate workshop, two panels, speed-mentoring, planning committee meetings and a session) and it was lovely to see and meet so many people. I mentioned that I did a webinar earlier in the week (a shorter version of my session on game design for learning), and if you missed it (and are interested), there’s a recording here.

I’m doing a three hour workshop on game design for learning with the ASTD-Middle Tennessee chapter on July 18 in Nashville — if you are interested, this is a BARGAIN at $29/$39 (be sure to read that last sentence in your best used-car-salesman-voice). Also doing a regular chapter session on Narrative Techniques for Learning.

Just arranged to do a half-day workshop for UX Week in SF August 21-22 on Change Management. Really excited about this one 🙂

As soon as I post this, I’ll remember six more things, but that’s what the edit button is for, right?

Update: YES – HERE IS THE THING I FORGOT:

ELearning Guild Thought Leaders Webinar on June 11th, 10:30 PT/1:30 ET – the topic will be Design for Behavior Change – registration info here

Problem Statements – The much shinier version

Posted on April 10, 2013 by jdirksen

The last blog post I wrote was about starting design with a problem rather than a solution, and it came from a conversation with Stephen Anderson about a presentation he was putting together for the IA Summit.

Here’s his presentation, and (of course) it’s great stuff:

You can’t solve problems you don’t know about

Posted on March 29, 2013 by jdirksen

So, several conversations recently are coming together:

– Judy Unrein’s post on Mike Monteiro’s How Designers Destroyed the World talk, and her discussion about how designers can’t be just be order takers (go watch the talk – it’s amazing)

– A conversation with Stephen Anderson about his upcoming IA Summit talk called Stop Doing What You Are Told! about reframing the design problem (soooo looking forward to those slides)

– Dan Lockton’s article in the guardian about sustainable design, which talks about how, if people aren’t doing things the way we would like, we should figure out how to solve their problems, rather than treating them as the problem.

Getting to the problem

So, this is hard. I think designers are often given solutions to implement, rather than problems to solve. I sometime think that’s half my job with clients — getting a clear statement on the problem they are trying to solve, or the opportunity they are trying to realize. It’s something where the outside perspective can really help — when you live with problems all the time, they frequently become tacit.

When I was teaching undergraduates, this was a hard idea to communicate, but it’s a key skill that everyone needs to have. I used to have a really simple card sorting game that I’d have my students play to see if they were being given a problem to solve, or a solution to implement. If it was a solution, then they had to work on a way to get the actual problem clearly stated.

I think, in light of Dan’s article, I’d tweak it a bit more, and talk about strategies for unpacking even the problem statements (e.g. the card “Sales people aren’t able to answer customer technical questions” would probably be better as “Customers have technical questions that they need answered during the sales process”).

I have several different questions that help me dig for the problem:

“Uh huh, and what do they need to do with that?” or “What do they need to do differently?”
“What bad thing will happen if they don’t know that?”
“Can you give me an example?”
“If you woke up tomorrow and we’d implemented this perfectly, what would be different?”
“What does is it look like when they get it wrong? What are common mistakes?”

Curious to know what other people do — what do you use to understand what the real problem/opportunity/challenge is?

Narrative Strategies for Learning

Posted on March 20, 2013 by jdirksen

Had a lovely time at the Learning Solutions Conference last week. Did a full day pre-con on Gameful Learning Design with Rick Raymer, which was a lot of fun.

I also did a session on Narrative Techniques for Learning. When I was working on Design For How People Learn, I listened a lot to a podcast on storytelling techniques.

A lot of learning and development folks *are* fiction writers, in the form of learning scenarios, examples and case studies, but (in my experience) it’s frequently pretty dull stuff (and I say this as someone who has written some dull scenarios myself).

So this session is about pulling some of the specific strategies that fiction writers use to into learning scenarios. There are a lot of other interesting ways to explore storytelling in terms of meta-structures, psychology and cultural constructs. This isn’t that presentation (though I’ll probably do that one too, one of these days).

This presentation is focused on specific strategies for making learning stories more interesting.

Narrative Techniques for Learning from Julie Dirksen

References:

Storytelling podcasts: http://www.storywonk.com and http://popcorndialogues.com/
The Hero’s Journey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heros_journey
Three Act Structure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_act_structure
Clark Quinn on narrative urgency: http://blog.learnlets.com/?p=2931
Movie Cliches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbhrz1-4hN4
Article: Effects of humor on sentence memory. Schmidt, Stephen R. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 20(4), Jul 1994, 953-967. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.953
TV Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
Resonate by Nancy Duarte: http://www.amazon.com/Resonate-Present-Stories-Transform-Audiences/dp/0470632011
Kathy Sierra on Building the Minimum Badass User: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-the-minimum-badass-user-business-of-software-a-masterclass-in-thinking-about-software-product-development/

Extrinsic Motivation and Games

Posted on January 31, 2013 by jdirksen

Hey folks, this is a really excellent discussion of the issues and research around using extrinsic rewards as a way to motivate behavior. Chris Hecker is looking at the question through the lens of game design, but it really, really applies to learning design as well.

There’s a write-up at the website, and a recording of the talk if you scroll down. It’s long-ish, but well worth the listen.

Found this via Amy Jo Kim on twitter: https://twitter.com/amyjokim

Usable Learning

Design for How People Learn

Category Archives: Instructional Design